Kanye Goes Off In Cannes: Instagram, Iconoclasm, Culture, and Celebrity

Kanyeezus Maximus touched down in France for the Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity, and like any other time you attach a mic to Ye, there were soundbites and quotes to be immortalized within the annals of webdom. Added as a late addition to the “Technology, Culture, and Consumer Adoption: Learning to Read the Cultural Landscape” Translation seminar, Kanye seized the opportunity to get on his soapbox and talk his proverbial shit.

Touching on everything from the Apple/Beats deal and its correlation with Jay Z, to the “uglyness” of the Internet and misconception of the significance of celebrity, Kanye sticks to his gilded guns and as always is prepared to dump gold-plated clips.

The most notable of this batch of “Kanye quotables” begins with Ye revisiting the parallels he’s drawn between himself and the late Steve Jobs:

“Steve Jobs, as everyone knows, was my biggest influence. Just seeing the way he fought to make things easier for people. After he passed, I made it my life’s mission to do what he did inside of that company,” West said. “I dream to help raise the palette and raise the taste level of a generation and also be involved with the production and distribution and advertising of that thing everyone’s begging for.”

Much of what Kanye says is very cyclical, you could even say he has reinvented “a” wheel. The wheel being his network and the collection of ideas he hopes to utilize and implement to create a better future, for consumers and essentially all of mankind. Looking to ultimately unleash a sweeping blow of iconoclasm against celebrity and consumerism, Kanye had this to say:

“People are less about the brand and more about self-confidence and how the brands can assist them, similar to what Steve was doing with tech,” West said. “This is my goal in lifestyle, in everyday life—to change the idea of what luxury is. Because time is the only luxury. It’s not all these brands that we just drove by that are somehow selling our esteem back to us through association.”

“When people think celebrity, which is the highest form of communication—we’re like walking networks or TV shows or brands in ourselves—you don’t think good taste,” he said. “And I believe that bad taste is vulgar. It’s like cursing. I think the world can be saved through design. Because what is the most distasteful thing someone can do? Kill someone. So, good taste is the opposite of that.”

Kanye West knows good taste. Ask him about anything… or don’t— he might “muhf**kin embarrass you!” Anywho, Kanye appeared to be in rare form and even spoke on the cosmetic state of the Internet:

“The world as a whole is fucking ugly. The Internet as a whole is fucking ugly, too. But I’m not in the construction business,” he said. “I said to Kevin [Systrom], why don’t you let us redo Instagram? Now, you know, Instagram is nice. It’s nice looking. I’m not knocking it. But just in general, everyone spends all of their time looking at their screens or their phones. And just as a simple task, we could clean that up.

“Right here, in Cannes, right now, we have enough people with the sensibilities and connections to completely make that a more beautiful place,” he added. “That is our future. People ask, Where’s our future? Where’s our flying cars? That is the world that’s floating above us right now. And we can make that beautiful with the people in Cannes right now.”